Note to Google: Microsoft Had the Right Idea

Instead of making Google+, Google should have followed Microsoft's "embrace and extend" philosophy and just cloned Facebook.

People always complain about how Microsoft never had an original idea and essentially stole ideas and strategies from other companies. This goes back to the early days of the company. It seems as if the idea worked. Look at how well Microsoft did.

And if nothing else, the strategy at least got the company to square one. From there, it was on its own.

This did not always work out, though. When Microsoft wanted to compete with AOL in the early days of online services, it tended to experiment with its own home-grown ideas. This, over time, became an uncompetitive fiasco.

With the exception of Excel, few products from Microsoft showed much originality. But at least, the company knew its strengths and weaknesses.

Google is a different animal. It likes to dream things up from scratch, and when it tries to copy someone else's ideas, it ends up pretty half-baked. Orkut is a good example. The company wanted to buy Friendster, but there was no sale. So it developed Orkut as kind of a Friendster network, with a bit of LinkedIn thrown in, too. The product become the odd-man out. In fact, if Google had the chops to clone LinkedIn, which it should have done when it had the opportunity, history may have been different. But Google does not have the corporate ego to do such a thing.

The irony to this, of course, is that Google's foundation was a clone of AltaVista, utilizing many of the AltaVista structures, such as caching the entire Internet. Its tweaks made it the killer app.

Anyway, so now we have this Google+ idea which is the Google's second attempt (that I know of) to compete head-to-head with Facebook.

I look at this and wonder why Google doesn't just clone Facebook with a better back-end. After all, what is Facebook? It's a huge flat database with a slew of front-end tools for users to essentially create a vanity website. This is not a new idea. The new part of the equation is Facebook has modernized the structure to an extreme and created a community around the implementation.

But Google owns blogger, which could have been used for a basis for such a community. And Google's Orkut should have been tweaked by now for a Facebook challenge. Google has enough smart guys to make a perfect copy of Facebook, with all the exact same functionality.

If Google cloned Facebook, it could employ the Microsoft "embrace and extend" philosophy. It was so powerful a strategy that most of the software industry was scared to death of the concept. For years, nobody would fund any software projects out of fear of the "embrace and extend" bogeyman.

Now I can understand that there may be some ethical or even legal issues of cloning Facebook. But there is prior art to pretty much everything Facebook does. So why doesn't Google clone Facebook if it thinks it is such a threat to Google?

Okay, let's assume Google thinks it can do all this better on its own. First of all, Google is not a social networking company with a social networking mentality. So it will never get it right. Microsoft is in the same boat. It could not even get its blogging initiative off the ground.

So how is this for a final thought: Why didn't Google buy MySpace and tweak it into something that would return it to respectability? Everyone who writes about social networking knows that MySpace could have better competed with Facebook, with a re-emphasis on bands and a tweaking of the UI. The folks at News Corp. were clueless about what they had, and now it's almost dead.

The fact is that Google is not going to manage to compete with Facebook, unless the Google corporate culture changes. I don't see that happening. If someone comes along to take on Facebook, it will not be Google.

John Dvorak is a columnist for PCMag.com and the host of the weekly TV video podcast CrankyGeeks. His work is licensed around the world. Previously a columnist for Forbes, Forbes Digital, PC World, Barrons, MacUser, PC/Computing, Smart Business and other magazines and newspapers. Former editor and consulting editor for Infoworld. Has appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, Philadelphia Enquirer, SF Examiner, Vancouver Sun. Was on the start-up team for CNet TV as well as ZDTV. At ZDTV (and TechTV) was host of Silicon...
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